With the promise to be world’s first community-owned smartphone ecosystem, the security and privacy-focused Librem 5 managed to raise nearly $2.5 million during its crowdfunding campaign, and it’s now on track to be released worldwide in January 2019 as Purism announces today major strides in manufacturing and development of the mobile device.
It would appear that Purism already managed to finalize the specifications for Librem 5’s hardware platform, placing an order to its manufacturer for developer kits that have the same base specifications as the final design of the mobile phone. Also, they managed to finalize the case design and UI shell of Librem 5, as well as the Contacts and Calls apps.
Promising to give users the freedom they need and complete control over their mobile phones, Librem 5 will bear features not seen in mainstream smartphones, including encrypted calling, native VoIP (Voice over IP) capabilities, end-to-end encrypted storage, SMS, and email, preconfigured VPN services, support for a wide-range of Linux-based operating systems, and a slot for an encryption smartcard.
The device will also support GSM, UMTS, 3G, 4G, and LTE mobile networks, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connections, and have hardware kill switches for the camera and microphone to prevent privacy breaches. The Librem 5’s source code will be publicly available after launch to allow users to modify it as they see fit or to develop additional apps and services for the mobile phone.